Rabies deaths in Kerala this year have almost reached last year’s total in just five months, according to an analysis published by Onmanorama on 24 July 2026 and written by Dr Shahul Hameed. It says that 28 people died of rabies between January and May 2026, compared with 33 deaths in all of 2025, so the 2026 figure is already about 85% of the previous year’s.
Dog bites show the same pattern. The article says that there were 3.69 lakh bites in 2025 and about 3 lakh in the first five months of 2026, and that the figure could reach 6 lakh for the year if the trend continues. Over the last five years, about 15 lakh people have been bitten. These are the author’s figures as published, and the piece appears under Onmanorama’s Kerala coverage, so IndiaX24 reports them as Kerala figures, though some search summaries presented them as national numbers.
The costs are given too. The author puts the cost of post-exposure vaccine treatment at about Rs 3,000 per patient, which would make the projected bill for 2026 about Rs 180 crore, and the total for the last five years about Rs 450 crore. Those are estimates in an opinion piece and not an official budget, and they cover treatment only and not the human costs of bites and deaths.
The Supreme Court has laid down directions. The article says the Court mandated that stray dogs in public spaces such as schools, hospitals and stations be captured, vaccinated, neutered and housed in permanent shelters, instead of being released back, and that the directions were issued about six months before the article. A separate report said that the Supreme Court took suo motu notice of fatal stray dog attacks and told dog lovers to feed dogs at home, which was reported as a search summary.
The practice has been difficult. The article notes that Thiruvananthapuram’s municipal corporation faced protests from animal rights activists over its dog capture efforts. The sources reviewed do not describe the number of shelters or the number of dogs captured, so the extent of implementation cannot be judged from them.
What is rabies? It is a viral disease transmitted through the saliva of an infected animal, most often by a bite, and once symptoms appear it is almost always fatal. It is, however, preventable with prompt treatment after a bite, which includes washing the wound and receiving the vaccine, and, in serious cases, rabies immunoglobulin. These are standard medical facts and are not taken from the Onmanorama article.
Why do deaths still occur when treatment exists? Common reasons include delay in seeking care, incomplete vaccine courses, and wounds that were not treated properly, though the sources reviewed do not analyse the causes of the 28 deaths, and no explanation is attributed to them.
The situation raises a policy question about the balance between animal welfare and public safety. The National Rabies Control Programme and municipal animal birth control programmes are meant to reduce the stray dog population humanely and to vaccinate dogs, and the effect depends on sustained sterilisation and vaccination, which is costly and slow.
For residents, the advice from health authorities is to wash any bite wound with soap and running water for at least 15 minutes and to go to a hospital immediately for vaccination, even if the bite seems minor. The figures from Kerala show that the risk is serious this year, and that the response needs to combine medical treatment with control of the dog population.
Featured image: A stray dog on a street in Pune (file photo; a stand-in image, not taken in Kerala). Photo by AVasanth (WMF), licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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